WEINSTEIN: The convenient memory loss of Chris Matthews

Like most days since Chris Matthews decided to adopt his left-wing MSNBC persona, he said something colossally stupid Thursday.

Matthews was on “Morning Joe” this morning to promote his interview with President Obama when he launched into a rant.

Obama “has had a very difficult opposition out there … who from the very beginning wanted to destroy this presidency,” he said. “And some of it is ethnic, and some is good old ideology. But they way they treated this guy is unusual in our history.”

“Al Gore accepted the fact, even though he won by 600,000 votes, that W. was president. And the Democrats accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush 100 percent,” he added, when host Joe Scarborough tried to push back a bit.

“There is an asymmetry here between the hard right and the Democratic center, there is a real asymmetry, Joe,” he continued. “There really is. And to say that they are both the same is not true.”

Really? The Democrats accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush 100 percent after Al Gore conceded? Maybe in Mathews’ bubble, but not in real life.

The reality is that Bush’s legitimacy was not accepted by much of the Democratic left after the Supreme Court decided in Bush’s favor in Bush v. Gore, especially during W.’s first term.

“He will be president legally. But he does not have moral authority, because his crown did not come from the people. It came from the judges,” the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said shortly before Gore conceded.

Groups sprouted up claiming Bush was “Not My President” because of the way he was elected. Bush’s inauguration was subjected to enormous protest by a liberal base that didn’t quite 100 percent accept his legitimacy.

“Not since Richard Nixon paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1973 has a presidential Inauguration drawn so many protesters — and last time, people were out to protest the Vietnam War,” the liberal online magazine Salon described the scene.

Prominent liberals also didn’t quite buy Bush’s legitimacy.

“I would like to apologize for referring to George W. Bush as a ‘deserter,'” faux documentarian Michael Moore said. “What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar and a functional illiterate.”

Moore would go on to sit in Jimmy Carter’s box at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and the Democratic establishment enthusiastically embraced his conspiracy-filled anti-Bush documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”